this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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Ray tracing is a conceptually lazy and computationally expensive. Fire off as many rays as you can in every direction from every light source, when the ray hits something it gets lit up and fires off more rays of lower intensity and maybe a different colour.
Sure you can optimize things by having a maximum number of bounces or a maximum distance each ray can travel but all that does is decrease the quality of your lighting. An abstracted model can be optimized like crazy BUT it take a lot of man power (paid hours) and doesn't directly translate to revenue for the publisher.
The downside is the wallet cost. Spreading the development cost of making a better conventional lighting system over thousands of copies of a game is negligible, requiring ray tracing hardware is an extra 500-1000 bucks that could otherwise be spent on games.
Ray tracing is so old I got my first ray tracing card for like 100 extra after selling my 970.
You can get a ray tracing capable card for $150. Modern iGPUs also support ray tracing. And while hardware rt is not always better than software rt, I would like to see you try to find a non-rt ighting system that can represent small scale global illumination in a large open world with sharp off screen reflections.
The wallet cost is tied to the performance cost. Once the tech matures companies will start competing over pricing and "the wallet cost" comes down. The rest of what you're saying is just you repeating yourself. And now I also have to repeat myself.
There's no reason to argue over the now, I agree that right now raytracing really isn't worth it. But if you're going to continue arguing that raytracing will never be worth it you better come up with better arguments.